The below clip is from a 40-minute behind-the-scenes documentary that will be exclusive to the Blu-ray of the not-half-bad 11th season of The X-Files. The disc set drops September. 18, and the clip shows the origins of Dana Scully, specifically how Gillian Anderson (a relative novice for whom this was her first big break) constructed the character in that initial pilot.

Today is the 25th anniversary of The X-Files, as the pilot premiered on the Fox network on Sept. 10, 1993. What followed was nine initial seasons from 1993 to 2002, two movies (Fight the Future in 1998 and I Want to Believe in 2008) and two revival seasons, one of which ran six episodes and the newest of which ran for ten.

As someone who checked out the show over the summer of its first season, back when networks actually ran a healthy number of reruns during the so-called off-season, I became as much of a fan as anyone else. I watched until the end, and I will argue that post movie seasons (six through nine) were, save for the mostly David Duchovny-free season nine, were about as good as the initial run. By the time Fight the Future teed the show up to essentially wrap up its core conspiracy arc in season six, the show had been on the air long enough and was established enough that it could focus on the long-term impact that the journey had on Fox Mulder and especially on Dana Scully.

When Chris Carter’s X-Files debuted 25 years ago on a Friday night, it was the 9:00 p.m. showing airing after Fox’s great seasonal, hope, the Bruce Campbell-led Brisco County Jr. The comedic western was entertaining enough, but the ratings weren’t hot and it lasted a single season. The ratings weren’t great for The X-Files either, but the show had strong critical notices and a passionate cult fan base that made itself known on the new thing called “the internet.” For better or worse, the entirety of how we talk about pop culture TV today (ships, fan theories, post-airing dissection, etc.) was predicated in how online fans discussed The X-Files on then-new chat boards and instant-messaging programs.

It was that passionate fan base that showed Fox that a show’s success, especially its long-term success, could be measured by more than just Nielsen ratings. The show limped along for three years, winning the Golden Globe for Best Drama in its second year (a key victory on the path to respectability and prestige). By the time it moved to Sunday night in its fourth season, the ratings were at least somewhat approximating the online fervor. The week that the fourth season of X-Files premiered, alongside the World Series and the much-hyped premiere of Chris Carter’s Millennium, was the first time ever that Fox would “win” the week in the weekly ratings game.

They even got a post-Super Bowl episode in season four, which was (unlike, for example, Alias) not an attempt to goose ratings but a proclamation of success. And its specific seasonal construction, which alternated between “monster of the week” stand-alone episodes and key sweeps-week “mythology” episodes, became a template for the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the slowly emerging serialized TV model and in turn now serves as the model for the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. And like the MCU, sometimes the stand-alone episodes are better than the "mythology" ones.

But what has always struck me as most interesting, alongside the obvious impacts (like the so-called Scully effect whereby young women looked to Anderson’s pantsuit-wearing FBI agent/scientist as a role model and became interested in STEM) and lingering legacy (folks who chatter about conspiracy theories aren’t as much fun as they were in the comparatively care-free 1990’s), is that the show wasn’t supposed to be a success. In fact, if I were to argue that The X-Files was a defining television drama of the 1990s and then CBS’ C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation was a defining 2000s-era network procedural, then we should note that neither of those shows was supposed to break out.

In the fall of 1993, Fox was betting on Brisco County Jr. to be the biggie. And in the Fall of 2000, CBS was banking on their much-touted remake of The Fugitive (starring Tim Daly and Mykelti Williamson). The 9 p.m. slot was given to a comparatively lower-profile crime-solving series loosely based on the various “using science to solve crimes” documentary shows that were popular on A&E and the like. But The Fugitive lasted a single season, ending on a cliffhanger no less, while William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger’s C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation became a supersmash and spawn an entire brand unto itself. Like The X-Files, C.S.I. entered its freshman season as an also-ran.

There are plenty of examples in even somewhat recent history of the surprise hit outperforming the preordained contender. If you had asked folks in March or April of 1994 which mad-bomber action movie would break out that summer, they’d have told you to bet on Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones’ Blown Away and not Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullocks’ Speed. Even this summer, it was Dwayne Johnson’s Skyscraper that was expected to break out here and abroad, not Jason Statham’s The Meg. And if you know your Disney history, you’ll know that, internally, Pocahontas was considered the prestigious “A” project versus The Lion King while they respectively in various stages of production.

Twenty-five years later, the key lesson of The X-Files is the same key lesson as Lost or any number of other high-concept fantasy TV shows. The plot matters and the mythology has an obvious visceral appeal. However, if you don’t put the characters first no one will care about the grand plotting. X-Files’ mythology as we know it was an accident, something begun in season two in order to justify Scully missing a few episodes (via alien abduction) after Gillan Anderson unexpectedly became pregnant. Folks watched the show not so much because of the big conspiracy or the black oil or the alien bounty hunters, but because they liked Mulder, Scully and the other core supporting players.

Same with Lost and even 24. Yes, the high concepts hooked us in, but it was our core interest in the core characters that kept us coming back. If anything, the likes of Lost didn’t get mythology-heavy until the second season, taking its sweet time to let us warm up to Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke and the rest. Ditto Fringe, which pushed too hard into the mythology right out of the gate but readjusted as a more character-focused procedural quickly enough to save itself. Conversely, the plot-first Lost rip-offs (The Nine, Flash Forward, The Event, etc.) didn’t last very long because they wrongly believed the audience would immediately become engrossed in the big questions or immediate mysteries.

The X-Files was “two FBI agents, a believer and a science-driven skeptic, solve cases involving the paranormal and supernatural.” Lost was just “a bunch of folks survive a plane crash and are stranded on a mysterious island.” The deep-dive storytelling came later after the audiences were invested in the characters themselves. Even 24 made a point to create memorable characters (Jack Bauer, David Palmer, etc.) so that you howled in protest when one of them died (periodically bumping off semi-regular characters was also something that began in network TV by X-Files). As Hollywood made a go of replicating television-style storytelling, it was the MCU and the Harry Potter franchise that realized that character trumps spectacle every time.

Happy 25th birthday to The X-Files, which is now old enough to rent a car. It is just one more example of how a medium-redefining hit (or even a zeitgeist-capturing winner) was a surprise and an outright underdog from the start. Its success set the template (long-form storytelling, feature-film-quality production values, a focus on character over plot, the potential for online obsessions) that paved the way for everything from Lost to Game of Thrones to the MCU. Oh, and we should note that X-Files was huge at least partially because it was unlike anything else on TV. Because you always get richer with the “first X-Files” than you will with “the next X-Files.”

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I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing ...